The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is the home of a shared instrument facility for confocal laser scanning microscopy and is currently equipped with Zeiss LSM 410. This instrument, now almost 10 years old, is used extensively by researchers from the College of Medicine, the Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer and Related Diseases, the UNMC/Eppley Cancer Center and the Veterans' Administration Hospital in Omaha. The facility is located in the Durham Research Center, a new 10-story basic research facility. This Center contains 136 laboratory modules plus one floor dedicated to core facilities including the Confocal Micorscopy Core. Occupancy of lab modules will be limited to current and newly recruited investigators with active research grants (NIH or equivalent) averaging ~$200,000/year/module. Our objective is to continue providing state-of-the-art facilities to enhance the quality of research at UNMC and to expand the capacity of our core to accommodate an increasing pool of users. This will be done through the purchase of a fully motorized confocal LSM system with up-to-date analytic software, lasers and accessories that give maximum resolution and separation of fluorescent emissions and detectors that acquire spectral signatures for each pixel. This will allow the user group at UNMC to perform optimized co- localization, and to conveniently obtain information about protein-protein interactions and protein trafficking in live cells. The projects listed in this proposal are selected from those of the 12 major users out of a current total of 19. It is anticipated that the user pool will double over the next 3-5 years with the expansion of the research effort on the UNMC campus through new recruitment and from the continued growth of a cadre of occasional users. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]